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this should end well
or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere
railgun microSD
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
Been there, done that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2
I'm laughing at how many bots wanted to share their trivia with you after this post
If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.
I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers?
In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
More than testing. That is their primary on-orbit link method for Starlink satellites as of 2.5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...
Neutrinos
Gravitational waves
Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
Why does a banking app require GPS?
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
It doesn't. They're making shit up.
To track you
Data collection and targeted advertising
- The UK is an island nation
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).
I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.
Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
That’s beyond about 90% of the population.
not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables
Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.
https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.
There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.
I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?
I didn't realise only people at war used cash
Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.
If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.
At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.
All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.
All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.
Do people write cheques in the UK?
No
Or checks?
Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.
There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.
I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.
A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Also, cool username =)
If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?
That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.
The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).
Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cutting-edge-timing-techn...
Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.
I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
TIL my banking app goes via satellite internet /s
I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.
Someone tell that to DDOS
nothing to see here; orbit on
one step closer to star wars
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
Unfortunately it's a little too late for that, those treaties are effectively dead anyway. Not a good situation but that is our reality.
Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will strike are their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.
Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.
Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?
We may have enough satellite imagery to build visual place recognition system. Geoguesst but for tanks